Producer/Director Notes
YouTube, Tea & Silver Paint:
Producing and Directing Moon on a Stick.
by James Gillingham
Let me first declare my interest in Moon on a Stick, being one of the writers I must straight away forego any pretence of objectivity. That said, and with my producer/director’s hat on, I do think I might be able to usefully share my experiences of the show, which might in turn I hope help to convince you to stage a production of it yourself.
We have been staging a summer-term musical At Ellen Wilkinson School in Ealing, West London every year for over a decade now. As a result, the proposition of doing a brand new show, although still a considerable challenge, seemed a reasonable one. Would-be cast and crew knew what would be expected of them in terms of commitment, and in return for their hard work they could expect a great deal of satisfaction, excitement, and fun, all hopefully culminating in five nights of great audiences sharing in their triumph.
However, with this new challenge, fresh thinking was required, and as we approached the two evenings of auditions, we tried to create an extra buzz of anticipation around the school. We designed posters featuring a show logo and what we hoped would be a suitably exciting promise of “big tunes, big laughs, and more aliens than you can shake a stick at”. Simple enough to do, but it proved to be a great help in getting the message to the kids that something a bit different was afoot. Another small but effective touch was to use the logo on the posters for the audition sign-up sheets too. We wanted to keep the brand consistent to give the impression that the show was already “alive”.
As luck would have it, the Performing Arts department had just been the fortunate recipients of some new Macs, and after a little bit of playing around with “I-Movie” we were able to, ahem, borrow lots of space-related images from the internet, combine them with a slightly-dodgy voice-over from me and, perhaps most persuasively, add an early version of “Cosmic Boom” supplied by our composer. While the result definitely wasn’t going to be giving anyone in Hollywood sleepless nights, we thought our “trailer” communicated the style and intent of the show pretty well. The week before the auditions we uploaded it to You Tube and asked all form tutors to play it to their classes (on their Smartboards) in registration.
You can view this original trailer here:
To our great surprise and delight the trailer was watched over three hundred times in the first few days. We had a record number signing-up for the auditions (two hundred and fifty) - an almost unfeasibly large number to cope with in the two scheduled after-school sessions.
The auditions themselves were an exercise in logistics as much as in creativity. We wanted to give every pupil the chance to show off their skills in their desired area. The girls were asked to specify whether they were interested in acting, singing, dancing or any combination of the three, and then with the help of my colleagues from the Performing Arts department we spread out over a number of rooms and got on with it. We had chosen several script extracts in advance and the pupils, on the whole, made an excellent job of them. Most pleasing was that the girls appeared to get the humour in the script straight away. Despite the vast numbers involved and the inevitable waiting around, there was much laughter and the auditionees really seemed to be having fun with the characters and the dialogue. After two days we had whittled the number down to an almost-manageable fifty, split into leads, singing and non-singing parts, and chorus. I was especially happy to be able to cast pupils from such a wide age-range (Year 7 right up to Year 13) and I never regretted doing so: the older pupils really helped the younger ones through the rehearsal process, and friendships were formed amongst cast members of all ages. This was going to be a “whole-school” production.
Moon On A Stick was ready to go into rehearsal.
During the auditions I had asked pupils whether they would be interested in contributing to a blog during the rehearsal process. Several stepped obligingly forward, and we were soon able to launch the “Captain’s Blog”, hosted initially on the school website. This proved popular, and as rehearsals went on the blog became more and more widely read. We began to include photos and videos, none of which cost any money, but which really helped to give people a sense that we were attempting something whose ambition was to be much more than the average school show. This was an ideal we were extremely keen to bring to all areas of the production. The Head was also pleased with the blog, and began sending the link to, amongst others, the school governors. She also started writing about it in her regular newsletters.
You can read the full MOAS blog here.
As rehearsals got underway we experienced that rush of excitement always felt at the start of such a new show project. The script continued to excite the cast and make them laugh (to the huge relief of the writers). The girls were enjoying bringing the characters to life and performing them in front of the others, and what’s more getting laughs. Rehearsals were filled with laughter, and there was precious little of the usual grumbling about after-school rehearsals. I suppose you could say I would say this, but genuinely, with a few exceptions, it was easy to direct. I had appointed two Year 12s as Stage Managers who would turn up to every rehearsal to prompt, take note of blocking decisions and generally support me as the director. They also did sterling work keeping the cast refreshed, making enough tea to drown a whale. By the time we reached the performances, these girls were supremely confident in their roles and a crucial part of the team - arguably even more committed to the show than members of staff might have been. They relished their responsibility and provided an excellent example to the younger pupils in the cast.
I was also lucky enough to have two talented sixth formers to take responsibility for the choreography in the show. At the time, our usual “dance expert” was on maternity leave and given my utter lack of talent in this area, I was relying heavily on these two. They both had a dance background and did a fabulous job, combining parts in the show with leading dance rehearsals for the cast. You can see the some of the fruits of their excellent work on the video clips taken from the performance.
In one of the early rehearsals I invited the full production team (consisting mainly of generous and talented colleagues) to come and talk to the cast. They talked with enthusiasm about their grand plans for the set, costumes, props etc which helped to reinforce the idea that this show was not only really going to happen, but that it was going to be big - just how big none of us would quite realise until a few months later.
We soon settled in to a regular pattern of acting, singing and dancing rehearsals. Often I worked with groups of actors on stage whilst simultaneously the Musical Director rehearsed songs in the music room. At the end of a rehearsal we would bring everyone together so we could share progress with the assembled cast. We were able to give copies of the backing tracks to the pupils with solos in the show. These were exported audio files from the composer’s Sibelius score, and although slightly artificial-sounding, they were small enough to fit on USB memory sticks, and the pupils benefited from having these tracks to rehearse with in their own time.
Following our early You Tube success we began thinking of other ways we could use video to promote the show. Initially we made a couple of short clips featuring the writers, which were clearly more fun for us than for anyone else. We then decided to turn to the cast for inspiration, which proved to be a much better plan. Two of the cast were given a camera for our first full run-through of Act 1, and after the briefest briefing, they merrily recorded themselves and their colleagues talking about the show, rehearsing their lines and generally larking about. They also took some shots of the scenes on stage being rehearsed. It was clear when we came to edit the footage that the girls had really captured the rehearsal atmosphere and the fun the cast were having.
You can see this video here:
It proved much more popular than our previous attempts and we resolved to make more as the rehearsals continued. I should mention that I wrote to all the parents of the cast to explain that we planned to use photos and videos as part of the marketing of the show, and gave them the opportunity to withhold their permission if they felt uncomfortable with this. This seemed like the right thing to do (it is quite probably also a legal requirement) and even though no parents expressed any worries at all I did ensure that the pupils were never identified with anything other than their character names in all of our publicity.
The set required two large-ish pieces of scenery – a communications “booth” and an unreliable Star Trek-esque transporter – but little else that was particularly troublesome. My colleague in the art department was keen to fill the remaining stage space with various high-tech looking (but crucially very cheap) elements to give that sci-fi feel. My co-writer and I have long thought that, paradoxically, the older the technology the more sci-fi it actually looks. With this in mind, we thought that if we could lay our hands on some old electrical appliances we could incorporate them into the set.
An invitation made in staff-briefing to colleagues to bring in any unwanted electrical equipment resulted in a deluge of obsolete technology and presumably once-loved electrical items: video recorders, DVD players, mobile phones, computers, metres and metres of various cords and cables, food mixers, electric toothbrushes and even, improbably, an oscilloscope. We quickly discovered that people were only too happy to offload the contents of their lofts, cupboards and garages, especially as we had promised that everything would be disposed of properly after we’d finished with it. We sorted all the equipment into two piles: one of smaller items that could be made into props and one of larger pieces that we were going to break up (very satisfying this bit) to remove their circuit boards. These circuit boards were then stuck onto flats and the front of the transporter; they looked fabulous.
One of the consequences of this idea was that we did not spend very much money on materials, with one notable exception: silver spray paint. This wonderful, toxic and probably environmentally catastrophic stuff transformed the most random and mundane items of electronica (if this is not a word, it should be) into cutting-edge sci-fi technology. Old keyboards, playstations, mobile phones, a small guitar, video recorders, all of them received the silver-spray make-over treatment and were incorporated into the set.
You can see a video of some of the cast and crew having fun smashing up electrical equipment - I mean carefully preparing props, here:
We were also able to make use of two giant silver pipes that we found abandoned by the heating engineers working on a new building on our school site. They had been earmarked for disposal until we swiped them and hoisted them into a vertical position one either side of the stage: a fortunate find that ended up looking great, especially when we eventually had the full theatrical lights on them. This “Womble Method” approach to making the set and props, i.e. making use of what we found lying around, was both in keeping with the environmental message of the show, and a good spur to the imagination. Wherever we could, instead of buying materials and making props from scratch, we encouraged pupils to make them themselves.
Another of our aims was to make quicker progress on the costumes than we had managed in previous years. Louise, our fantastic Wardrobe Manager, writes in detail about this here.
We made considerable efforts to get as many of the costumes together as possible well in advance of the dress rehearsal so that we could photograph the characters and use them in publicity posters, which you can see below, or view as a PDF.
By this stage we had replaced the original logo (knocked-up in about ten minutes) with a brilliant new version designed by professional illustrator Jonathan Edwards (http://www.jonathan-e.com/) and this made its debut, along with the character posters in the weeks leading up to the show.
These went down really well, apparently giving the cast something akin to film-star status around the school. I am certain too they contributed to ticket sales. They weren’t particularly difficult to make with a bit of basic Photoshop knowledge. We also put up around school posters bearing our new logo with all the ticket details etc. Also, in a first for the school, we made it possible for parents and pupils to book tickets via email which proved very popular (accounting for about a hundred of the overall tickets sales).
We recorded some of the cast delivering their lines from the show and incorporated them in combination with the character photos into an official trailer. Again, this was constructed in the simplest possible way using I-movie, but was given a filmic gloss by the composer’s remix of “Cosmic Boom” (a vast leap in quality from the basic versions that we had had available until this point).
A week before the performances we screened the trailer in assembly and performed one of the songs from the show “Junkfood Express” in full costume,. Not only was this great fun and an excellent opportunity to advertise the show to the whole school, but it also gave some of the younger chorus members a chance to experience performing in front of an audience for the first time.
The last few weeks passed in something of a blur as the cast and crew went through various emotions: excitement, panic, hysteria and then back again. Final rehearsals were helped along with a by now great team spirit, gallons of tea and large quantities of homemade cake (new offerings of which seemed to appear as if by magic each day). Before we knew it, and as ever, before we were quite ready, we were about to perform our traditional preview show for an invited audience of Year 6s from local primary schools.
If I’m honest, the first performance was a little disappointing. The huge efforts of the technical rehearsal hadn’t ironed out all of the bugs in the lighting and sound plots, plus the perennially uncooperative radio mics did their usual routine of whistling loudly at inappropriate moments. On the positive side by this stage the show was being run by our wonderful stage crew and I was left to sit at the back of the hall, biting my nails, wandering around and annoying the sound and lighting crew by reminding them of upcoming cues that they had clearly no intention of forgetting.
We gathered backstage after the curtain fell and refocused for our second show of the day. This was scheduled three hours later, at an after-school, pupil-friendly 4.00pm and ran much more smoothly than the first, and after the curtain had come down and most of the make-up had been scrubbed off, everyone went home tired but absolutely delighted and exhilarated. Everything had finally come together, and Moon on A Stick was finally go!
The next two nights saw two really fantastic, professional shows, with record audiences and lots of big laughs, all spurring the cast on to deliver ever more assured performances.
Our final performance was at a local professional theatre, and this was going to be an epic day for all of us. We had packed the large van full of the set and costumes the night before, driven to the theatre at 7.00am, re-built the set, set the lights, had a technical run-through, a short break during which the whole cast went to McDonalds (spectacularly failing to see the irony of doing so bearing in mind the main theme of the show) and then performed the show one last time in front of a full-house of three hundred.
It was a great to end on such a high. There were a few technical problems, understandable perhaps with so much to get right in such a short space of time. The smoke machine for example produced only a few wisps before going on strike for the rest of the evening. But the girls pulled out all the stops to make it a night to remember, and the atmosphere back stage, as caught by our camera, was a mixture of nervous energy, adrenalin and elation – in short the sort of ending that made everyone involved so thrilled and proud to have been involved. It wasn’t until we (the adults) made it to the nearby co-writer’s house at about midnight, having struck the set, packed the van and persuaded the cast to go home, each armed with a large glass of red wine, that we felt a strange feeling creeping over us.
Exhaustion? Partly. Sadness that it was all over? Certainly. Satisfaction? Unquestionably.
The girls of Ellen Wilkinson had made the first production of Moon on a Stick a triumph, through their hard work, inspiration, energy, imagination, belief, committment, laughter, tea, hard work, cake, camaraderie and yet more hard work.
We, and they, had loved every moment of it.